Lecture on Judith Butler's "Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire" vis-a-vis Gender and Classification

I. Background: On Maps

The enormous variety of people in the world presents one's mind with so much information that to make sense of people, it's necessary to employ some classification schemes. Most of these are discrete schemes, meaning that the options are distinct and separated. But the spectrum is an example of a continuous classification scheme.

• ONE POINT: totalizing, singular, unitary
• TWO POINTS: binary, dichotomy, dyad, opposition, either-or
  • Self-Other
  • male-female
  • hetero-homo
  • Type A - Type B personalities
• MORE POINTS: taxonomy, matrix, adding exceptions
  • queer groups: G -> GL -> BGL -> LGBT -> BGLTI
  • Wittig's lesbian as the Third Sex
  • Fausto-Sterling's "Five Sexes"
  • 12 signs of the Zodiac
• SPECTRUM: interval, continuum, range, axis
  • Kinsey scale
  • butcher--femmer, etc
  • politics: Left--Right

II. Background: Terminology

• ontology is the study of what it is to be. it is therefore closely allied with what Butler calls the "metaphysics of substance" after Kant (metaphysics being the study of laws above the physical ones, so that questions about the nature of personal identity belong in this field)
• epistemology is the study of knowledge: when and how we are justified in saying we know things.
• reification is the social process of taking an abstract entity and treating it as a thing. A good example is IQ.
• the normative: the normal, backed by coercive force/compulsion.
• hegemony: institutional control in the social sphere. Sort of like a cultural monopoly of power, not necessarily overtly maintained.
• economy: a closed system of exchange.
• matrix: a famously murky term in Butlerspeak. For our purposes: effects installed by a collection of related but possibly independent parameters. For instance, parameters like sex, race, and class are often considered side-by-side, and one could refer to the complex causal forces flowing from their various conjuctions to be a matrix of identity.
• to parse is to unpack for meaning, as when confronted with a complicated sentence. For example, the following sentence is grammatically correct, but needs thought to interpret: That the rain that fell was wet was clear.
• metonymy and synecdoche are both figures of speech which involve substitution of one element for another which it is taken to represent. For instance, "suits" for businessmen, or "skirts" for women.

III. The Goals

Which brings up the main challenge that the paper addresses:

Butler will talk about the French feminists, especially Irigaray and Wittig, in some depth, but ultimately she'll propose a new sort of answer.

IV. Key Points in Butler's Ontological Project

• Grammar conferring identity: this is, she argues, at the heart of Descartes' famous COGITO ERGO SUM ("I think, therefore I am.") The point isn't that Descartes is capable of thinking and therefore he exists; rather, he makes sense as the subject of a sentence, and therefore he exists. NOTE: Butler ultimately is skeptical of this use of grammar, but it merits some extended treatment here because it ties in to the notion of intelligibility which is important later.
  • "...the grammatical formulation of subject and predicate reflects the prior ontological reality of substance and attribute." In other words, if a sentence can be parsed by others, that implies some shared ideas about the ontological status of the different parts of the sentence. The fact that "Unicorns are pretty" is intelligible means that a unicorn is an entity and pretty is a way to be.
  • grammar, as Wittig would have it, depends on genders (more evident in French, say, than in English) and therefore, if you believe the grammatical underpinnings of personal identity, then identity is fundamentally gendered.
• Butler is perhaps most famous for her elaboration of the idea of performativity.
  • The notion of performative speech, created by J.L. Austin, is one where speech acts create, instead of simply describing, effects. "I now pronounce you man and wife."
    "I promise to do X."
    "You're fired."
    "I want to tell you that Y."
  • "Performativity is the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed."
  • In terms of her stance on identity, she argues for gender performativity as being not simply an activity, but actually one that constitutes the intelligible self. That is, the constellation of acts and activities that make our gender readable to others are not simply performed by a person, but in fact the performance is the person: "There is no being behind doing."
  • Practices in gay lives reveal the performed/parodic quality of gender for heterosexuals: for instance, the butch/femme dynamic is harder to pass off as "natural" than the manly/girly dyad. "Thus, gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but as copy is to copy."
• Performance is not, however, unlimited, but rather is closely controlled by a set of regulatory practices.
  • Differentiation of people is accomplished through closely regulated practice, creating false unity.
  • Regulation is accomplished by community standards enforced with the threat (and sometimes reality) of violence.
  • This brings about the "compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences," making a narrative which insists that bodies, actions, and desires are all knit together in prescribed ways.
• In sum, from these concepts arises a central claim. As to, What is a Person?, she might respond: A person is a stably intelligible gender performance.

V. These Notions in Action

• Connell, "The Social Organization of Masculinity"
  • Argues that practice/process constitutes masculinity.
  • "Gender is social practice that constantly refers to bodies and what bodies do, it is not social practice reduced to the body."
  • Connell's relations of hegemony, subordination, complicity, and marginalization are essentially a catalog of regulatory practices as per Butler's scheme.
• Graves et al, "Man: An Assay"
  • Here, the photos probe specific sites in culture for the construction/production of normative masculinity: the military and military schools, prison, and sports. Attributes trained in those settings are discipline, order, harnessed aggression, and group cohesion with alliances prescribed by external authority figures.
  • At these sites, iconic masculinity is made, honed, mimicked, and rehearsed.
  • Also visible in these photos is the intense homosocial aspect of these manly arenas-- men are thrust together into very intimate settings and configurations. This underscores the need for strict, violent policing to prevent the homosocial from becoming homosex.
• Ma Vie En Rose
  • The affluent suburbs are a powerful representation of the normative in this film. This is vigorously reinforced by visual elements and plot devices: cars pull out of identical driveways at the same time; the alarm-system business is thriving; the trimming of hedges is a constant on-screen activity; the houses have nearly identical layout.
  • The film really foregrounds the increasingly menacing regulatory practices which are imposed on Ludo: mounting coded threats from parents; forced participation in sports; haircuts; threats and physical violence from peers (with brothers' complicity); visits to the psychologue; graffiti.
  • Ludo's character provides excellent evidence for a central Butlerian theme: his gender performance is very clear, while his identity remains quite muddled.
    • Performance: Pam dance, wedding ritual, clothing/style preference
    • Identity: at various points, he thinks he is a girl, should be a girl, or will be a girl; he is constantly asking people to clarify this for him
• King, "You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman"
  • As Butler would have it, the song "contests the naturalization of gender" by highlighting the analogy/metaphor aspects.
  • Butler wryly suggests an alternative: "You make me feel like a metaphor of the natural."